Comment by boffinAudio
4 years ago
Every week, I encounter a user - just like I did in the 80's - who cannot explain the difference between a file and a folder.
"What do I use a folder for?", they ask, in the same breath that they request "some way to organize things logically".
The no-filesystem movement has worked hard to eradicate this scourge from user experiences, but I fear that this is the devils work. Computer users should know what a file is, and what its for - and they should know what a folder is for, and why they would want to create one to put their files into it ..
But yet: they don't.
It hasn't improved since the 80's. Taking away the users responsibility to understand these things, only makes computing worse. The fact that "special chars in paths" breaks things, also holds this factor into place, imho.
> The no-filesystem movement
Is that the movement to store all your data as an amorphous pile of crap, and then provide easy-to-use search tools to actually find the content you're looking for?
On one hand, I really like the search tools that come from this. But I still like to actually organize my data, so I can browse it if I want to. Also, these search tools seem to only work well enough on macOS and fall flat on their face in Windows. (and no idea where Linux falls on this)
You had me at "amorphous pile of crap", but lost me at 'actually find the content'... ;)
Meanwhile, I've got a single directory full of PDF files (over 60,000+) which I routinely "ls -alF | grep <search term>" for, and I've also got some PyPDF scripts for doing deeper content search - but yet I yearn for a way to automatically parse the filenames and organize things categorically into a folder tree resembling a word cloud, symbolic links and all .. one of these days ..